Social networks are enabling sociologists to study the way that a person’s social group affects their personal behavior/decisions, especially in things that can have public policy implications, like from smoking and obesity.

"What all these studies do is force us to start to kind of rethink our mental model of how we behave," said Duncan Watts, a Columbia University sociologist. "Public policy in general treats people as if they are sort of atomized individuals and puts policies in place to try to get them to stop smoking, eat right, start exercising or make better decisions about retirement, et cetera. What we see in this research is that we are missing a lot of what is happening if we think only that way."

More than almost any other internet-based phenomenon, social networks seem to simply mirror organic constructs that humans have already been maintaining in the real world for a long time. There’s been much talk of the ways that technology occasions reorganization in our lives (Blackberries, laptops, and universal phone numbers being prominent examples), but social networks are probably the biggest example of it working the other way. We created them to make sense of our natural, real-world ways.

It’s no secret that the reason people find them so exciting is the level to which they resonate with/mirror the societal constructs we already create in the real world – friendships, affinity groups, job-related organizations and contacts. It’s very cool to read that this holds up so well it can be studied, that the bounds of the virtual and the actual worlds overlap so much here that it’s possible to study things happening on social networks as being simply part of normal human behavior and not just human behavior as it occurs online.

I continue to be amazed that people can see Fox “News” as a legit news outlet. Whatever happened to the normal decency of you know, not calling for people in the race to be killed? Whatever you think about the folks in the presidential race, can’t we all agree that anyone seeking office in this country is a patriotic American who at least deserves the simple dignity of not having to endure people calling for their murder on national television? Isn’t that par-for-the-course of being human? How can you equate an office-seeker with the guy who led the 9/11 attacks and not just sort of implode under the weight of your own sliminess?

This list made it to Digg. Some are long-known, some are good new resources.

Kind of a fascinating post on the technical challenges Twitter faces. Here’s the final graph from part one:

The social web is creating demand for new scaling tools and technologies. Current databases and caching solutions are simply unable to handle a complex network of multiple relationship between objects. While databases are still a good solution for persistent storage of social data, each retrieval requires heavy calculation. These are the exact challenges Nouncer is attempting to solve and commoditize in the microblogging space. In the short run, an “inbox” approach to scaling microblogs might be the logical approach, but in the long run we have some exciting problems to solve.

Since I showed up grudgingly and late to the Twitter party, I’ve surprised myself by getting into it as much as all the fankids did when it came out a couple years ago. And I’ve definitely seen some pretty decent-sized service outages just in the couple weeks I’ve been messing with it. After getting into Cal Henderson’s Building Scalable Websites and working on a Rails-based social networking app for a client earlier this year, I’ve been thinking about the various problems involved in scaling, and it occurred to me that Twitter had to have some pretty major issues, even before I started to experience them myself. The sheer fact of the access abilities that Twitter gives you – I hit it on a regular basis with my iPhone, Adium, and an Apple Script that ties in with Quicksilver and Growl – means that you’re going to end up with a vast quantity of people expecting real-time results nearly 24×7.

That ability to do the whole Twitter dance from a multitude of devices and protocols is what got me into it (I would never have even signed up if I had to log in somewhere every time I wanted to change my status), and it also has to be a huge part of the general challenges they’re facing. The barrier to entry is set low enough to challenge a limbo champion, the app becomes super-popular, and suddenly, like it or not, you’re on the forefront of the challenges involved in web scaling.

Seems pretty obvious from today’s post on dev.twitter.com that they’re well aware of standing in the gaze of tech history, too. And kudos to them for being so honest about their challenges. It’ll endear them to the already massive community of geeks who love their service and hate their downtime, and it’ll no doubt spur some quality engineers to answer their call for help. I was especially impressed by Al3x’s honesty in this graf (even if the things he’s saying are pretty obvious):

Our direction going forward is to replace our existing system, component-by-component, with parts that are designed from the ground up to meet the requirements that have emerged as Twitter has grown. First and foremost amongst those requirements is stability. We're planning for a gradual transition; our existing system will be maintained while new parts are built, and old parts swapped out for new as they're completed. The alternative – scrapping everything for "the big rewrite" – is untenable, particularly given our small (but growing!) engineering and operations team.

Make no mistake about it, Twitter is definitely in a race against time to make sure that they’re not overtaken by the multitude of clones out there. But this level of honesty about their approach to the problem is only going to end up strengthening the case they make to their users to stay with them through the growing pains.

More Facebook user fail.

Facebook has decided to block its system from Google’s Friend Connect, citing privacy concerns.

Arrington calls it the beginning of “the social network wars“. Predictably, he cuts straight to the cynical biz play that others failed to mention:

This of course has nothing to do with the fact that Facebook launched their own nearly identically named product called Facebook Connect three days before Google’s Friend Connect.

It’s not clear exactly what features of Friend Connect justified the ban, since it is so similar to what Facebook announced on Friday. Both products allow the export of profile and friend list data to third party websites.

In the end though, this won’t be that big a deal simply because people desire the kinds of data (lists of friends, movies they want to see, pictures of last night’s party) that they put into Facebook to be portable, and that’s going to happen whether Facebook likes it or not. The technology is against them. Scoble points to the market’s first proof of this – a company with the maddeningly “Web 2.0″ name Minggl:

Me? I think Facebook has a point, but I think the horse is out of the barn already and Facebook won’t be able to shove it back in.

Why? You should check into Minggl. It’s a toolbar that does far more than what Google’s Friend Connect does.

But it does it in a way that Facebook will never be able to block. Why? Because it’s your browser that scrapes all your friend’s info into Minggl’s browser bar. That bar then uploads all that information back up to Minggl. There’s no way that Facebook will be able to block Minggl. If Google wants to push the issue they should do exactly what Minggl is doing.

This, as I’ve said before, is where the Google advantage lies. They’ve embraced openness in format, API philosophy, and protocol (CalDAV, OpenSocial, Jabber are examples of each) and just started building a bunch of useful services, throwing more resources behind one thing or another when it starts to stick to the wall.

What we’re seeing the beginnings of here with this Facebook dust-up is proof that a big part of the likelihood of success for any given app is based on the data portability, and there are very few corners of the Big G’s web empire that don’t have rich API access (Google Analytics, I’m giving you the stink eye here). That inspires people to use Google services more and more, simply because you can base other software around it.

Facebook’s problem?

• 1) they don’t have that killer-combo ecosystem of apps and personal productivity stuff
• 2) they’re not going to get it from the community of “Facebook developers” that has lurched into existence since they opened their architecture a year ago
• 3) they haven’t seemed to have developed an answer to the fact that their audience could evaporate as soon as someone puts together a slightly better mousetrap.

Facebook depends on a user’s desire to do their social networking through the Facebook app, within the strictures of the Facebook interface, following the rules of the Facebook universe. Problem is, social graph data is a lot more personal than that, and people are just going to want it to be portable. Period. If that weren’t the case, we wouldn’t have Minggl. (I hate typing that word).

As soon as people don’t have to use their data from within the sphere of Facebook itself, things start to go downhill for Facebook. Because there’s no other reason to use Facebook but Facebook. Google on the other hand can bring together a community of use around itself, making its docs and chat and email and calendar part of one grand information-sharing scheme that has elements of social networking.

Social networks are just a sort of design pattern for the web, like portals or – at perhaps a slightly lower level – forums. They’re not an end in and of themselves, and they certainly aren’t a business model for very long. They depend on audience, and Facebook is basically about as stable as a successful TV show. Once the creative minds stop hitting it, the audience will evaporate.